A Hangover You Do Deserve
by baka deshi
Summary: Alfons Heiderich doesn't know much about his strange new roommate, but that's nothing a little rum can't fix, he figures. Humor.


This, Alfons noted through the dusky haze that was his world right now, was a _really_ good rum. The room swayed ever so slightly as he attempted to raise the bottle to his lips again, and he frowned at it.

Correction. Maybe he was the one swaying. He snorted and leaned back even harder against the warm, stocky thing keeping him upright (Edward?) and kicked it back. The rum went down on a sweet, syrupy burn and he coughed a little, tried to figure out how to set it down without spilling any. Sloshing this stuff on the floor would be a crime.

Edward, sitting/flopped over next to him reached out, picked it up. Alfons looked idly over his shoulder at his friend, who was also flushed a brilliant red. At some point they had been on the couch, Alfons vaguely recalled, but the rum was so good it had just melted them off it, onto the floor where the world didn't spin so much. He wondered how much they'd had. He wondered if his legs were ever going to work again.

"...'s some good shit," Edward proclaimed drunkenly. "Why do we drink beer again? Beer is pretty...cheap and shit, but it's shit, and THIS shit is the good shit. You know?"

"Yeah, I know," Alfons smiled at him indulgently. Right, there had been a reason they were doing this, other than that the rum was good, and a windfall from an impressed client. Edward was a ranter by nature, and with beer goggles on that tendency, like many aspects of his personality, became magnified. With a quarter bottle of rum inside him, Alfons was confident that perhaps he could finally get Edward to rant about the things Alfons was dying to know - namely, where the hell he had come from anyway, and why he was so damn secretive about it all the fucking time.

"Where'd we get this from, anyway?" Edward asked, trying to find a space wide enough to set the bottle down. It must have grown in diameter, because he seemed to think it needed a foot of clearance before it could safely be placed back on the floor between them.

"Professor...I forget his name," Alfons admitted. Seemed like a good place to segue into his plot, though.

"An' what about you? Where'd you come from?" he asked, masterfully changing the subject to Edward. He was so slick! He should have been like, a master detective like Sherlock Holmes. He envisioned himself confronting the Red-headed League, Professor Moritarty...and Edward could be his little Watson tagging after him...

"Where'd I come from?" Edward was staring at him askance, then started sniggering. "My mother. What, where'd you come from, an egg? A laboratory?" He laughed harder and waved his real hand about like an orchestra conductor, urging unseen multitudes to notice his cleverness. His weird false arm hung stiff and unresponsive at his side, the way it sometimes did when he'd had too much to drink. Edward had a hard time controlling his prosthetic when he was hammered.

"Also, my father," Edward added, suddenly sounding more serious. "But he's a bastard, you know that."

Yes, that was about all Alfons knew about Edward's father; other than that sometimes that "bastard" sent them money for things (like engines and fuel components), that he always included a note asking how Edward was doing, that Edward grumbled but always slunk off to be alone so that he could write back.

He really didn't know that much about his roommate at all, he realized all over again; it was somewhat sobering.

Edward certainly wasn't, though. He flipped his brilliant shock of blond hair back over his shoulder and his head lolled, like a puppet whose strings had just gotten cut. God, he was drunk, Alfons snickered.

"You really wan' to know, though?" Edward asked. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, which given his inebriation was something closer to a dull roar. " 'Fons, can you keep a secret?"

"Sure," Alfons says agreeably.

Edward takes a deep breath.

"I don't come from this world," he says, and scowls at Alfons hard, like he's daring Alfons to laugh. "I was born in a place called Amestris, in a lil' town out in the country"  
"Ahaha, you mean, 'America'," Alfons says, and he does giggle a little at his friend's drunken pronunciation. He is not at all surprised Edward is American; he speaks English but his accent is nothing like the Brits Alfons knows.

"No, I mean, _Amestris_!" Edward growls. "You wanna hear the story or not?"

"I'll be good," Alfons says meekly, and gropes about for the bottle of rum. Edward has quite the temper, and whether or not he can speak the damn language clearly right now he can most definitely shout in it. The bottle is a mile away, Alfons notes with annoyance; it takes forever to get his arm around it. Around it? Funny, why didn't he just pick it up with his hand. It is hard to drink when he's holding it in the crook of his elbow, after all.

He corrects it, takes a swig, and by then Edward is ready to go on.

"So my brother and me, right? You know my brother, Al, right?" Edward asks hopefully and Alfons rolls his eyes. As if Edward didn't already spend every other second talking about him. "So Al and I were into alchemy - it doesn't work here - but it was some cool shit, you know what I'm talkin' bout?"

"Lead into gold stuff?" Alfons blinks. A nice fairytale, but impossible. It would require a tremendous amount of energy to force protons out of a lead atom.

"No, like, anything into anything...well if there's equivalency..." Edward is rambling even more erratically than usual. "Okay so anyway, we were really good at it. Then um, our mom got sick and," a brief cloud passed over his face. "Some stuff happened. But then!" He perks up again. "We moved in with this awesome alchemist! And she was a martial arts master. And that's why I kicked so much ass at the bar the other night, she taught me all this secret stuff and I'm damn good at it." Edward preened.

"Oookaaaay," Alfons smiles and nods. It is true Edward had wiped the floor with the bouncer, who had been giving him shit. It was also true they were no longer welcome at that establishment because of it.

"But before she would teach us, so she put us on this island...and we had a knife and had to kill rabbits and make our own shelter and fight the wild natives and shit, and Al cried like a baby when he had to kill the rabbit so I had to do it for him, and I fought with this wild animal to protect him and I still have the scar from it! Er, on my one arm I don't have anymore."

"...right," Alfons said. This story was starting to change from "sort of embellished" to "complete bullshit".

"And then, when she'd taught us everything we wanted to know, we um..." Edward's face darkened so suddenly it was almost alarming. "...some other stuff happened. Bad stuff. I lost my arm and my leg..."

"Aw hell, I'm sorry," Alfons said, feeling bad for doubting his friend now. That had to be a real memory, and probably a real bitch for a guy to remember at that. He nudged the bottled toward Edward and rum helpfully leapt out of it at his friend, dribbled down onto Edward's sleeve. Alfons frowned at it for being too over eager.

"Thanks," Edward said, and sucked rum out of his sopping jacket sleeve to fortify himself. "Anyway, so where was I? Right, the stuff that happened. So then! I got this badass automail, right? It was like my prosthetics, only made of fucking steel, and it had the full range of motion unlike this piece of shit." He jerked his head toward his limp false arm.

"Piece of shit!? No way," Alfons cried, not sure he could sit back and listen to that amazing piece of technology take flak. God, did Edward not understand it was like something straight out of science fiction? He had been itching to take one of those falsies apart for weeks now, if Edward didn't need them so bad; Alfons was dying to know just how the hell it ticked.

"Piece of shit next to automail," Edward said agreeably, and reached for the bottle. Alfons attempted to give it to him, but it wasn't cooperating and ended up on the floor instead. There wasn't much left in it for some reason, so it didn't gush all over, but it also refused to cooperate when he tried to reacquire it. Alfons looked mournfully over at Edward, who could at least still lap at his sleeve, which was conveniently attached to his person. Lucky rum-coated bastard.

"Where were you?"

"'Automail'?" Alfons replied helpfully.

"Right. Okay, so then um...I met the Colonel!" Edward said. "No wait um, I met the Colonel before the automail. Well okay, so I met him first but then I called him and said I was going to take the exam, and he said that was cool and to get on this train, and then the train got hijacked but I kicked the guy's ass and un-hijacked it."

"Um, right," Alfons said, blinking.

"And then Al and I went to live with this guy and his daughter -" another brief flicker of sorrow? remorse? before Edward plowed on ahead with his increasingly bizarre story, "- and then I got to take the exam...the State Alchemist's exam, you see. Best alchemists in the country, the gov't gives you a watch and a title, and a lot of cash, but in exchange you have to be their bitch, but that was okay cause I was going to fix the stuff that happened. And I was the youngest person ever to get a government title. I was twelve."

"...right."

"And then Colonel Bastard - okay Mustang, but we called him bastard - started sending us all over the country doing his bitch work, you know, putting down insurrections and stuff, the usual out east, and we saved a lot of people's lives and rebuilt buildings and not because I knocked all of them down, sometimes buildings are just old and fall down, you know?" He winked drunkenly, conspiratorially at Alfons. "There was this one time? We were in Aquaroya, and we took down this criminal mastermind, and she was smoking hot and even came onto me. Cause they called me the People's Alchemist and everybody freaking loved us out east."

"We were so famous that people even tried to pretend to be us, you know? There were these two morons that did that, but I kicked their asses too, and then I saved the town from this toxic waste by exploding a forest."

"...is this what rum does to you?" Alfons asked suddenly.

"Huh?"

Alfons scooped the (empty!?) bottle off the floor and chucked it over his shoulder.

"Hey!" Edward squawked indignantly and tried to run after it, but he seemed to have too many legs to stand up. He tipped over onto Alfons's lap and then slid down onto the floor, complaining all the while.

Floor seemed good right about now, Alfons thought woozily. He lay down next to Edward and tried to talk him out of getting up again.

"You can be my new best friend," he announced magnanimously. "Cause I think the bottle broke anyway."

Omake: (The aftermath)

Dawn...or maybe noon...fell suddenly. Like a sledgehammer.

Something stirred next to him and Alfons groaned. The BRIGHT stabbing through his eyes went right to his head, and he swatted his friend as hard as he could.

"Owwww, fuck...Edward, for the love of all that is holy, _turn off that damn light!_"

"I can't," came the mournful, mournful reply. "I think it's called the sun."


End file.
